[Distutils] Design rationale for the egg format ?

[Paul Moore]

On 14 June 2010 07:59, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a few questions about the egg format implementation, and was
> hoping people who designed it could answer them:
>  - why does the filename encode some metadata (which python version if
> the package contains extensions, platform specifier) ?

I'm not one of the designers, nor an expert, but I believe that this
is so that the basic metadata can be obtained as part of an initial
listdir(), without needing to open and read a file at all - so
essentially it's to reduce the number of OS calls needed in certain
key cases.

Paul.